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Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Turning the tables and questioning Darwinists. You want evidence? I'll give you evidence!

Funny how easy it is to turn questions around on Darwinists. For instance, I have one commenter who kept sending me this long list of questions and I finally answered them, but he then restated the same question another way twice. Ugh. Why don't we find Ichthyosaurs and Dolphins in the same layers of sediment? Hey, we find whale kinds but perhaps they had not speciated to Dolphins yet back 4300 years ago. Rapid speciation fits the Creationist model quite nicely. Whale kinds speciated into various forms of whale, many of which can mate. Did you know that we have seen that the majority of non-baleen whale kinds can and do mate and mix? You have heard of the Wholphin, right? Did you know that bears of various "species" can and do mate? Polar Bears and Brown Bears and Grizzly Bears can and do mate from time to time. All sorts of dogs mate with each other, but can also mate with wolves. The Darwinist concept of what classification is and what species are is a bit off. We need to divide the world of organisms into created kinds - bara min - and then figure out who is related to whom.

A better question is how did Coelecanths disappear and reappear? They were supposedly an ancestor of modern fish and possibly a "fishapod" of sorts that lived 380 to maybe 80 million years ago and presumably then evolved into something else. Until 1938 when fishermen caught one off the coast of Africa near Madagascar. Now we know they are found not only off the African Coast but that there is another version of them living in Indonesian waters. The Wollemi Pine was extinct but now has been found. The Gladiator Fly. The Lazarus Rat. Dozens of specimens that appear in the fossil record and then disappear have been found living today. Now, if the fossil record is evidence for a world-wide flood, finding that some animals have changed, some have remained about the same and some have gone extinct is no big surprise. After all, several "species" of animals have gone extinct within the last 100 years. Passenger Pigeons. Marsupial Wolves. DoDo birds. On the other hand, the Crocodile is pretty much the same as it was when captured in fossil form and so are dragonflies, although they do not grow as large as they once did. How do Darwinists account for this slap in the face to evolution, when we can show that the supposedly ancient ancestors who were stepping-stones to modern animals are still around, while the transitional forms from one animal to another are not found? Has there been even one true transitional form found, where we see systems or organs beginning to evolve, some kind of stepping-stone from one thing to another? I do not know of one example of a creature that actually qualifies. Commenters will probably mention a few that we know are simply a type of animal that is fully developed and stands alone.

Just so you know, classification of organisms is descriptive rather than prescriptive. We can observe and test and figure out things that Linnaeus never could have, because we can now read DNA and understand a great deal about reproduction he could not possibly have known. Baraminologists will require many years to identify clearly the primary kinds and classify their offspring properly, continuing the task Linnaeus began long ago. Creationists are not trying to destroy the work of Linnaeus, we are just continuing the work he started.

Although Blyth, a Creationist, was the first to coin the term "natural selection", a pioneer in the Darwinist world was Alfred Russell Wallace, a man who soon came to doubt the sufficiency of natural selection as a driver of evolution.

"Contemplating butterflies was among the considerations that drove evolutionary theory’s co-discoverer, Alfred Russel Wallace, to doubt the sufficiency of natural selection to account for the most wondrous aspects of animal life. Like lepidopterist and novelist Vladimir Nabokov a half-century later, Wallace noted the astonishing, gratuitous artistry with which butterflies adorn their wings.In The World of Life, Wallace wrote of how he could satisfyingly account for this only as a feature intended by design “to lead us to recognize some guiding power, some supreme mind, directingand organizing the blind forces of nature in the production of this marvelousdevelopment of life and loveliness" - David Klinghoffer, page 16, The Case for Intelligent Design in a Nutshell Chrysalis

"In Act I, the focus is on the mind-blowing magical routine by which the caterpillar enters into the chrysalis, dissolves into a buttery blob and swiftly reconstitutes itself into a completely different insect, a butterfly.

A cute graphic sequence shows, by way of analogy, a Ford Model T driving along a desert road. It screeches to a stop and unfolds a garage around itself. Inside, the car quickly falls to pieces, divesting itself of constituent parts that spontaneously recycle themselves into an utterly new and far more splendid vehicle. A sleek modern helicopter emerges from the garage door and thumps off into the sky."

Darwinists cannot answer so many basic questions. One of the baseless charges made in the comments thread is that I don't depend upon evidence when making posts. Au contraire! The posts I make usually consist primarily of evidence and arguments about that evidence. The commenters are the ones using derision and asking the same questions over and over as if they had not been answered. Well, let's see you commenters step up to the plate and answer some questions as if you actually had any answers...

Creation.com has challenged Darwinists to answer 15 important questions and I have excerpted the post below and a blow-by-blow dissection of the questions and the failed attempts to answer them. Questions 1-8 are thoroughly covered below the first article:

A grass-roots movement to challenge the anti-Christian dogma of evolution

“Question evolution!” is off to a great start. The Traditional Values Coalition (TVC), which is one of the largest non-denominational, grassroots church lobbies in America and speaks on behalf of over 43,000 churches, is promoting the campaign. With so many churches involved, there is going to be a whole lot of questioning of evolution going on! Get involved yourself and get your church involved as well—let us work together to spread the truth.

The campaign involves people empowering people to stand firm together against the evolutionary indoctrination so rampant in our schools, universities and media. You can encourage your friends to ‘Question evolution’—especially if you are a student who is being force-fed evolutionary dogma.

Students certainly should question Darwinism in their schools and encourage others to do it too—after all, don’t teachers urge students to “question everything”? Students have a right to question the evolutionary pseudoscience peddled to them...

… grass-roots revolt against the force-feeding of everyone with evolutionary ‘there-is-no-need-for-God’ thinking.

15 Questions summary

Note to would-be evolution defenders: please read the full brochure and linked articles before attempting to answer the questions, otherwise you will likely be wasting your time boxing at shadows.

How did life with specifications for hundreds of proteins originate just by chemistry without intelligent design?

How did the DNA code originate?

How could copying errors (mutations) create 3 billion letters of DNA instructions to change a microbe into a microbiologist?

Why is natural selection taught as ‘evolution’ as if it explains the origin of the diversity of life?

How did new biochemical pathways, which involve multiple enzymes working together in sequence, originate?

Living things look like they were designed, so how do evolutionists know that they were not designed?

How did multi-cellular life originate?

How did sex originate?

Why are the (expected) countless millions of transitional fossils missing?

How do ‘living fossils’ remain unchanged over supposed hundreds of millions of years?

How did blind chemistry create mind/intelligence, meaning, altruism and morality?

Why is evolutionary ‘just-so’ story-telling tolerated as ‘science’?

Where are the scientific breakthroughs due to evolution?

Why is evolution, a theory about history, taught as if it is the same as the operational science?

Why is a fundamentally religious idea, a dogmatic belief system that fails to explain the evidence, taught in science classes?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Have Darwinists tried to answer these? Let's look at the first attempts:

Note: many of the answers published here cover far more ground than the pamphlet could, since it necessarily dealt with the topics in an abbreviated form.

General Objections: These are objections which may deal with the pamphlet in general.

The more our biological knowledge expands, the more problems evolution has.

Objection 1: These questions are only unanswerable because our science isn’t advanced enough.

Rebuttal: But if science has not yet advanced, then how could they possibly know what can be answered in the future? They tend to discount predictive prophecy, at least when it’s in the Bible. If more questions about evolution were answered by scientific advance, the skeptics may have a point. But exactly the opposite has been true in the past. The more our biological knowledge expands, the more problems evolution has. For example, Darwin thought that the cell was just a blob of goo; now we know it is a miniature city with advanced nanotechnology, including machines and factories.

Objection 2: CMI uses a misleading definition of evolution. Evolution is only the change in allele frequency in a population over time.

The evolutionist Gerald Kerkut defined this as ‘the theory that all the living forms in the world have arisen from a single source which itself came from an inorganic form.’1 This is a perfectly justifiable definition, and one that secular scientists would agree with—and this is what the dispute is about!

Objection 3: Even if science cannot explain the origin of life, to say that God must have done it is an argument from ignorance.

Rebuttal: We do not argue from what we don’t know, but from what we do know about the nature of the information encoded in the DNA, the complexity of life, etc. Our argument is, to quote from a previous response:

“In objects ofknownorigin, there are certain features—specified complex information—that occur only in those made by an intelligent designer (or an intelligently designed program). So by the normal analogical reasoning we use in science, when we see these features in an object where the origin is unknown, we can likewise conclude that this object had an intelligent designer.

“These features are those that an archaeologist would use to determine whether an object was designed by an intelligent designer, or that a SETI devotee would use to argue that a signal from space came from an intelligent alien, or whether a ballot or card game was fixed, or whether a sequence of letters was the result of intelligence or monkeys on a keyboard.

“In the first two cases above, it would be perverse to complain that the archaeologist didn’t discuss whether the object’s designer itself had a designer, or that the SETI researcher didn’t tell us who designed the alien. It would be even sillier to argue from this that we should simply drop the idea of design, and conclude that the object or hypothetical space signal had no designer.”

Saying, “We don’t know, but evolution did it somehow,” on the other hand, is an argument from ignorance aka ‘evolution of the gaps’.

Objection 4: Many of these questions involve things that are very improbable. But we know that improbable events happen all the time.

Objection 5: CMI uses quote mining, citing scientists as part of their argument against evolution even though these scientists are evolutionists. CMI quotes scientists out-of-context.

Rebuttal: Any quote that is less than the entire work of which it is a part could be smeared as ‘out of context’. We take care not to take any quote in a manner that is other than what would be intended in the context. It is acceptable to use ‘hostile witness’ quotes to show how even people who believe evolution admit its difficulties.

An example of a genuinely out-of-context quote would be Darwin’s on the eye, where Darwin was talking about its seeming absurdity but then said that after all it was quite easy to imagine that the eye could be built step-by-step (in his opinion, with which we obviously disagree). This is why it’s on our Don’t Use page, one of the most read on our site (and even praised by Richard Dawkins himself).

Some of our opponents seem to think that quoting an evolutionist who has conceded a problem with evolution (even if he actually made such a concession) is ‘quoting out of context’ simply because the evolutionist would not agree with our position in toto. But this is a quite bizarre understanding of misquoting.

1. How did life originate?

Answer 1: Abiogenesis is not relevant to the discussion of evolution—it is a separate topic (this has been a very common claim).

Rebuttal: No one claimed that abiogenesis was irrelevant to the evolution debate until evolutionists realized they were losing the debate on it. Indeed, abiogenesis is also often called ‘chemical evolution’ (see Natural selection cannot explain the origin of life and here just one example of a paper by evolutionists proving the point, titled, “On the applicability of Darwinian principles to chemical evolution that led to life”, International Journal of Astrobiology3:45-53, 2004). It doesn’t matter how well one can or can’t explain how the first life could evolve, if you can’t explain how it got there in the first place, the theory is literally dead in the water (or the (non-existent) primordial soup, as the case may be). Notice also that, as we stated clearly above, creationists believe in changing allele frequencies over time. Therefore, since both sides claim this as part of their model, the debate must lie outside this area. Hence, the origin of life is fair game for discussions on whether or not evolution is true.

“It seems to me that Richard Dawkins constantly overlooks the fact that Darwin himself, in the fourteenth chapter of The Origin of Species, pointed out that his whole argument began with a being which already possessed reproductive powers. This is the creature the evolution of which a truly comprehensive theory of evolution must give some account.

“Darwin himself was well aware that he had not produced such an account. It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.”2

If there’s no way for the DNA code to come about via natural processes, evolution is impossible.

If there’s no way for the DNA code to come about via natural processes, evolution is impossible. A huge problem is this: the DNA information requires complex decoding machines, including the ribosome, so it can be decoded into the specifications to build the proteins required for life, including enzymes. But the information required to build ribosomes is itself encoded on the DNA. So DNA information can’t be decoded without products of its translation, forming a ‘vicious circle’. And decoding machinery requires energy from ATP, built by ATP-synthase motors, built from instructions in the DNA decoded by ribosomes … ‘vicious circles’ for any materialistic origin theory.

Answer 2: Originally, life used RNA instead of DNA to encode information.

Rebuttal: First, where is the evidence for this, such as fossilized ancestral RNA life? Second, the RNA world hypothesis is fraught with difficulties. RNA is even less stable than DNA, and that is saying something—about a million DNA ‘letters’ are damaged in a typical cell on a good day, which then requires repair mechanisms to be in place (another problem for origin-of-life scenarios). And it is extremely unlikely that the building blocks for RNA would come about by undirected chemical interactions, and even if this happened, it would be even more improbable that the building blocks would self-assemble into any RNA molecule, let alone an informational one. And this is only the tip of the iceberg. See this article for more details, which discusses the objections of a major origin-of-life researcher to the ‘RNA world’ hypothesis.

Answer 3: It is disingenuous to argue from the current DNA code, because the original code would have been much simpler.

Rebuttal: This is most disingenuous. So many evolutionists have appealed to the common DNA code to “prove” common ancestry. But now they are claiming that the first life had a different code not possessed by any living creature! But how could we go from the hypothetical simpler coding system to the current one? It would be like switching keys on a computer keyboard—the messages would become scrambled (as anyone who is accustomed to a QWERTY keyboard who has tried to use a non-QWERTY Latin keyboard would know only too well).

Actually, it has long been known that there are exceptions to the code, as we have pointed out (see The Unity of Life) and that is a problem for evolutionists. Richard Dawkins was recently stumped when “ life-creator Craig” Venter pointed out that there were different codes—Dawkins has long taught that evolution was supported by a single code and used this to argue for the single (evolutionary, of course) origin of all life.

There is a certain minimum amount of information which would have to be encoded for any living thing to survive. Currently, the self-replicating organism with the least amount of genetic information is the Mycoplasma genitalium with 580,000 ‘letters’ coding for 482 proteins. But this can only survive as a parasite, so non-parasitical life would have to encode even more information. See How simple can life be?

Answer 4: The question of how the modern code emerged from these early predecessors is evolution itself. Random deviations in the nucleic acid structure would change the by-product produced, if the by-product was more efficient at replicating, it would overwhelm less efficient codes. This gradual change in the complexity of the underlying code is useful in explaining many aspects of biological theory. Such as why RNA is used as an intermediate between DNA and protein synthesis.

Rebuttal: Random deviations would randomly change the “by-product produced”, so they would disrupt all the proteins encoded. RNA is used as an intermediate because it is more labile; it’s optimal for the short time frames needed for cell communications. It is a hopeless candidate for hypothetical eons in a primordial soup.

Answer 5: The words ‘code’ and ‘language’ are only metaphors when applied to the DNA code, and they have no reality outside our own mental constructs. In reality, the whole thing is dependent on chemical properties.

Rebuttal: Secular scientists refer to the nucleobases of DNA as ‘letters’, so it’s hardly original to us. And we would agree that the workings of the code are due to chemical properties—we are not vitalists (see also Naturalism, Origins and Operational Science. But this doesn’t explain the origin of the code. Similarly, we believe that the workings of computer decoders can be explained totally by the laws of semi-conductor electron levels and other electrical properties, but these laws didn’t make the computer. Should we say then that there is no difference between a 500 GB hard drive and an old 2 MB one, because it has no reality outside our mind? Also, this is a rather petty thing to dispute, since it does not address any of the arguments from the pamphlet. One wonders why we received several objections of this nature.

Answer 6: It is easy to create amino acids and the building blocks for RNA by running an electrical charge through mineral-rich water.

3. How could mutations—accidental copying mistakes—create the huge volumes of information in the DNA of living things?

Answer 1: If only eight mutations per year were passed on for three billion years, that gives 3 gigabytes of information.

It is becoming the consensus even among evolutionist geneticists that mutations are like spelling mistakes in an instruction manual, which overwhelmingly degrade information.

Rebuttal: This assumes that those information-gaining mutations occur—which hasn’t been shown. Second, as a population grows larger, it is harder to fix new mutations in the population, because the cost of substitution is greater (this is Haldane’s Dilemma).3 Third, it assumes that the mutations that will be fixed are the sort that create new structures, such as lungs, feathers and wings. But it is becoming the consensus even among evolutionist geneticists that mutations are like spelling mistakes in an instruction manual, which overwhelmingly degrade information. These changes can be adaptive (helpful to survival or ‘beneficial’) in certain circumstances, but they are still heading in the wrong direction to make evolution tenable. This includes antibiotic resistance, wingless beetles on windswept islands, blind fish in caves, and chloroquine resistance in malarial parasites. A recent paper shows that even the “beneficial” mutations work against each other—it’s called antagonistic epistasis.

Answer 2: Computer models have shown how mutations can lead to large-scale change.

Rebuttal: Every computer simulation of information-gaining mutations known to us stacks the deck in favour of evolution and in no way simulates what actually happens in real life. You might as well argue from the computer game Spore (although some do). See the articles on genetic algorithms and Dawkins’s Weasel program at our Natural Selection Q&A, as well as the more sophisticated Mendel’s Accountant, which does simulate (model) the real world genetics of living organisms. We know that mutations break things—and it’s far easier to break something than to make it.

Note also, that the issue is not the size of the change: dogs and cabbages both exhibit enormous variety, but they are still dogs (wolves, coyotes, German shepherds, etc.) and cabbages (broccoli, Brussels sprouts, etc.). These changes can occur within an animal or plant type (kind/baramin). Evolutionists need to find a mechanism for ‘nature’ to invent new genetic instructions for complex new features such as feathers for reptiles, if evolution did really change a reptile into a bird, for example.

Answer 3: Using words such as ‘accidental’ and ‘mistakes’ is misleading and misses the point entirely.

Rebuttal: Again, this sort of language is used by secular scientists, so take it up with them. But an assertion is not an argument—our opponents didn’t even defend this assertion. Carl Sagan, an ardent evolutionist, admitted: “ … mutations occur at random and are almost uniformly harmful—it is rare that a precision machine is improved by a random change in the instructions for making it.”4 How can random changes be anything but ‘accidental’ and ‘mistakes’?

Well so far our evolution defenders have not delivered the goods. Keep tuned for the next installment of attempts to answer the 15 questions.

Further reading

Questions 4–8

Published: 14 September 2011(GMT+10)

Here we continue our appraisal of various attempts to answer our 15 Questions for Evolutionists. We’ve compiled many of the answers that we’ve received to date (paraphrased to cover as many versions of the answer we’ve received as possible), along with our refutations.

4. Why is natural selection, a principle recognized by creationists, taught as ‘evolution’, as if it explains the origin of the diversity of life?

Demonstrating some example of natural selection is not demonstrating ‘evolution in action’ because no new genetic specifications are being created by natural selection.

Answer 1: It is disingenuous for creationists to claim to accept natural selection and not ‘macroevolution’, since the cumulative effect of the former leads to the latter.

Rebuttal: Actually, there is not one undisputed example of one structure arising gradually through natural selection. But if natural selection was the engine for evolution, we should have many examples of this happening. Rather, every example of natural selection that we have shows that it is a conservative force which specializes creatures to be better adapted for their environment. This involves a loss of information; for example, a population of bears in a cold climate losing information for short and medium-length fur (see How information is lost when creatures adapt to their environment).

The major issue here is that natural selection does not create any genetic information, so ‘natural selection’ is not the same as evolution. Demonstrating some example of natural selection is not demonstrating ‘evolution in action’ because no new genetic specifications are being created by natural selection. So there is nothing disingenuous about creationists accepting natural selection but not molecules-to-molecular-biologists evolution. However, it is disingenuous of evolutionists to continually equate natural selection with evolution.

However, high-profile evolutionists themselves have long recognized that ‘macroevolution’ is not just a matter of more ‘microevolution’; it is qualitatively different (so CMI advises against using these terms, which tend to create confusion). In November 1980 a conference of some of the world’s leading evolutionary biologists, billed as ‘historic’, was held at the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History on the topic of ‘macroevolution’. Reporting on the conference in the journal Science (Vol. 210(4472):883–887, 1980.), Roger Lewin wrote:

“The central question of the Chicago conference was whether the mechanisms underlying microevolution can be extrapolated to explain the phenomena of macroevolution. At the risk of doing violence to the positions of some of the people at the meeting, the answer can be given as a clear, No.”

Francisco Ayala (Associate Professor of Genetics, University of California), was quoted in the same article as saying:

“… but I am now convinced from what the paleontologists say that small changes do not accumulate.”

Answer 2: There are over 100 new mutations for every child born. It is inevitable that evolution would happen with this rate of mutation. Those with the best mutations survive and reproduce.

Rebuttal: We’ve noted the mutation rate—and that it’s a huge problem for evolution. 100 mutations is actually the lowest (unrealistically low) possible number of new mutations per person, and that’s already extremely problematic for evolution. You see, in the evolutionary view, there have been 100 new mutations for every child for millions and millions of years. That’s billions of mutations.1 This also collapses a common argument for human-ape similarity: why should there be any similarity at all in the alleged five or six million years since their alleged common ancestor (but see also Evolutionists abandon the idea of 99% DNA similarity between humans and chimps).

When a person reproduces, his genes as a whole (half of them) are passed on, with both beneficial and non-beneficial mutations. It’s not as if a certain gene gets selected—it’s the group of genes that the person has. Most mutations are nearly neutral, emphasis on nearly. We don’t need to worry about the really catastrophic mutations being passed on most of the time; they often result in the death of the individual or otherwise prevent reproduction (natural selection operates here to remove the lethal ones, thus acting as a conserving force).

But most mutations aren’t like that—the person can survive. The deleterious effect may be so small that it’s imperceptible by itself. But add up thousands, hundreds of thousands, of those mutations, and you have a substantially ‘less fit’ individual than someone from the first generation. This person isn’t an example of evolution—he’s an example of devolution. He’s more likely to have problems like allergies and immune system disorders, he’s more likely to have trouble reproducing, and he’s probably got a shorter lifespan (without modern medical help), just for starters. And it gets worse for his descendants, because eventually all these mutations build up to an unsustainable level, and we get a situation that Dr John Sanford, geneticist, describes in Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome (see our review):

“When selection is unable to counter the loss of information due to mutations, a situation arises called ‘error catastrophe’. If not rapidly corrected, this situation leads to the eventual death of the species—extinction! In its final stages, genomic degeneration leads to declining fertility, which curtails further selection (selection always requires a surplus population, some of which can then be eliminated each generation). Inbreeding and genetic drift then take over entirely, rapidly finishing off the population. The process is an irreversible downward spiral. This advanced stage of genomic degeneration is called ‘mutational meltdown’. Mutational meltdown is recognized as an immediate threat to all of today’s endangered species. The same process appears to potentially be a theoretical threat for mankind” (p. 41).

5. How did new biochemical pathways, which involve multiple enzymes working together in sequence, originate?

Answer 1: There’s no reason to think that the first life was as complex as today’s—the simplest forms would be extinct by now, out-competed by the more complex modern forms. A self-replicator can be as simple as a strand of six DNA nucleotides. These self-replicators set the stage for evolution to begin whether or not you call these molecules ‘life’.

Answer 2: Furthermore, looking at the biochemical processes in detail at a moment in time does not indicate the evolutionary history of an organism. Scaffolding is a means to develop a process. Furthermore, evolution is established on the macroscopic level through morphology as well as on the molecular level with genetics. As the understanding of biochemistry proceeds (as it is a much younger science), a better understanding will develop. Furthermore, as Michael Behe learned at the Dover trial, there is a lot known about the evolution of proteins, such as with the immune system.

Rebuttal: Lots of assertions here with little to back them up. Taking each sentence in turn:

In one sense, it is good to see that some evolutionists have finally abandoned the discredited “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”argument applied to biochemistry. But this also exposes the inconsistency of a major evolutionary argument: supposedly the many biochemical similarities prove evolution from a common ancestor with these features. But then it turns out that the ancestor didn’t have these features at all! E.g., all life uses DNA because of common ancestry, but then this common ancestor didn’t use DNA. Or, there is a common pentadactyl (five-digit) limb pattern in all tetrapods, because they all came from a common ancestor that walked up on the land from the sea. But the usual candidates for this common ancestor don’t have five digits—Acanthostega had eight, while Ichthyostega had seven, although all of these, including the much hyped Tiktaalik, have been trumped by more recent fossil evidence.

Scaffolding is really the “spandrel” argument by Lewontin and Gould.2 Yet there is no further evidence presented.

The morphological evidence is dealt with elsewhere, and is a change of subject.

There is yet another quasi-prophetic appeal to what we will understand in the future, but this is of course a tacit admission that evolutionists don’t have an answer now.

Lots of rubbish has been talked about the Dover Trial, where a previously unknown judge became the darling of the liberal media and evolution-pushing organizations by parroting the ACLU submission in his verdict. See our analysis.

Answer 3: It’s not a lucky accident!

Rebuttal: And if the question was, “Was the origination of new biochemical pathways, which involve multiple enzymes working together in a sequence, a lucky accident?”, that would be an answer to our question, although still only an unsupported assertion. Either it’s a lucky accident or it’s designed. Selection can’t work before these already exist in a functional form—it’s pure chance. But the question was how did they come about, and this didn’t even attempt to answer that one.

6. Living things look like they were designed, so how do evolutionists know that they were not designed?

Answer 1: They don’t, but to say they are is a mere argument from ignorance.

Rebuttal: If evolutionists admit they don’t know, isn’t that by definition an admission that they’re arguing from ignorance? Also, as stated in part 1, the argument from design is based on what we do know.

Answer 2: If there were a designer, we should see designs tending toward simplicity, not complexity. Yet that is the opposite of what we see.

Rebuttal: So life is too complex for it to be designed? This is a new one! In any case, this is only a form of argument from bad design, refuted in a number of articles under What about claims of ‘bad design’?

Actually, the critic also forgets the Fall, so we should see degeneration, as pointed out in our book By Design. We have previously noted that many parasites are genetically depleted compared to free-living equivalents—see articles under How does biblical Christianity explain the origin of poisons, and pathogenic bacteria and viruses. Thus it should be called devolution not evolution (a downhill change is consistent with the biblical Creation-Fall model). This was backed up by an interview with famous evolutionist Lynn Margulis in Discover April 2011:

“Both the treponema that cause syphilis and the borrelia that cause Lyme disease contain only a fifth of the genes they need to live on their own. Related spirochetes that can live outside by themselves need 5,000 genes, whereas the spirochetes of those two diseases have only 1,000 genes in their bodies. The 4,000 missing gene products needed for bacterial growth can be supplied by wet, warm human tissue. This is why both the Lyme disease borrelia and syphilis treponema are symbionts—they require another body to survive.”

Answer 3: Vestigial organs provide evidence of evolution: these are structures which once had a purpose but no longer do.

Just because we don’t know of a function for a certain organ or system doesn’t mean there is none.

Furthermore, it’s ironic that this critic accused us of using an “argument from ignorance”, then did just that! Just because we don’t know of a function for a certain organ or system doesn’t mean there is none. One important and recently discovered function of the appendix—a safe house for beneficial bacteria—should have been a lesson. At least, that should have been the argument 100 years ago. Today, we know better. See also Do any vestigial organs exist in humans?.

Answer 4: There are structures that would be horrendously designed, but they’re easy to explain if they evolved. The laryngeal nerve is one example of this.

Answer 5: It’s very lucky that everything works out just so it looks like it were designed, but if it weren’t, we wouldn’t be around to notice it.

Rebuttal: It’s a simple explanation—except it’s not an explanation. The analogy that we have borrowed to show the inadequacy of the explanation is if I were surrounded by an execution squad comprising expert marksmen, each person with a rifle, and they all fired, but I was still alive afterwards, it’s equally true that if it hadn’t happened that way I wouldn’t be around to observe it, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be surprised by it. So that we exist doesn’t make it any less surprising that we do.

7. How did multi-cellular life originate?

Answer 1: It was beneficial for cells to work together.

Rebuttal: That may be true, but while that may tell us why such a fully developed system is advantageous, it says nothing about how such a system originated, and what benefits the incomplete stages would have.

Answer 2: Colonies of cells that cooperated were the first step.

Rebuttal: There is a huge difference between a colony of single-celled organisms and a true multi-celled organism, and no known mechanism would enable an organism to make that leap. For example, there is a big jump between selection for single cell reproductive success and that for integrity of a multicellular organism. In complex creatures, great reproductive success of a single cell type is usually called cancer. See Evolution of muticellularity: what is required?

8. How did sex originate?

Answer 1: Sexual reproduction allows for evolution at a much faster pace than asexual reproduction. Organisms that exchanged DNA were thus able to evolve out of situations that might have killed their asexual counterparts.

Rebuttal: Another answer which tells why but not how. Creationists can explain the origin of fully functioning sexual reproduction, from the start, in an optimal and genetically diverse population, at the hand of an intelligent Creator. Once the mechanisms are already in place, they have these advantages. But simply having advantages doesn’t remotely explain how they could be built from scratch. The hypothetical transitional forms would be highly disadvantageous, so natural selection would work against them. Sexual reproduction involves fine tuning on both the molecular level (so DNA from two individuals can combine into a new one) and the macroscopic level: in many cases, the male and female genitalia are precisely tuned so one could fit the other, meaning that they could not have evolved independently.

It’s also only partially right: yes, because of recombination, sexual reproduction allows much variability. But it also allows a successful organism to pass on only half the genes to any given offspring (and in a stable population by definition, there is only one offspring per parent). This acts as a conservative force. This is a good thing, because most mutations are harmful, and it’s a good thing they are not passed on. But for evolution, it’s a problem since any putatively beneficial mutation has a 50% chance of not being passed on. Also, sexual reproduction allows these harmful genes, if recessive, to be shielded by a backup copy.

Answer 2: Sex depends on both the male and the female. Any incompatibilities would cause sterility and would be selected against.

Rebuttal: Sex is indeed dependent on the actions of the male and the female, but unless you’re some kind of neo-Lamarckian, that isn’t going to lead to complementary structures. The fact that natural selection will weed out sterile individuals doesn’t explain how functioning sexual reproduction came to be, since there’s a lot more ways to make something that doesn’t work than something that does. Incidentally, many responses to this question show more confidence about the origin of sex than Dawkins had. See Evolution of Sex (Refuting Evolution 2 chapter 11).

Reader’s comment:

Mark J., Australia, 13 September 2011
Great article. Its only a pity that these kinds of questions don't make the public arena. But the answer to that is obvious: the evolutionary logic, or lack of, is so deficient that no evolutionist wants it exposed to the light of day, or light of truth. Keep up the great work.

Further reading

References

According to theory, the fixation rate of neutral mutations is roughly proportional to the mutation rate. Therefore, 1,000,000 years / 20 years/generations = 50,000 generations. 50,000 generations x 100 mutations/generation = 5 billion mutations, more or less, in 1 million years. This is a complete overturning of the genome! Why is there any similarity between chimpanzees and man left after a supposed 6 million years of separation? Return to text.

See Gould, S.J. and Lewontin, R.C., The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 205(1161):581–598, 1979. Return to text.

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Actually, Creationists have got answers Darwinists have not begun to find and we can explain the Universe pretty much soup-to-nuts while Darwinists still grope around trying to find an explanation for why anything exists at all. We actually have people who call themselves Astrobiologists, but if we did find life on another planet that would just be one more place where secular scientists couldn't explain how it came to be. Later on this fall I will share with readers the almost pathetically lame argument supposed mega-brain Stephen Hawking uses to explain how the Universe came to be. For now, let's see if any commenters have any comprehensible answers at all to the questions. I am thinking probably NOT!!!!

60 comments:

"The posts I make usually consist primarily of evidence and arguments about that evidence."

Radar, the posts you make consist of creationist lies and drivel, and the only thing that saves your soul is that you don't know you're repeating lies and drivel. Case in point:

"In Act I, the focus is on the mind-blowing magical routine by which the caterpillar enters into the chrysalis, dissolves into a buttery blob and swiftly reconstitutes itself into a completely different insect, a butterfly.

This is not what happens during metamorphosis. Recent studies have shown that the stem cells which will become the adult imago are already present in the larva, just dormant in a form called 'imaginal discs'. These cells become active during the larva's last instar and probably help trigger pupation. By the time the pupa forms, the disc cells are already growing rapidly. Inside the pupa, the remaining larval cells either die to become raw materials, or are radically reshaped under the influence of the imaginal cells as they grow the adult butterfly body.

How can anyone take you or your sources seriously in your attacks on evolutionary science, when you and they are so obviously badly behind in understanding non-evolutionary science?

As for your list of questions: some are irrelevant, some are illogical, and some are just wrong. But explaining which ones are which would take more time than I have at the moment. Or in the next month.

Radar: "A far better question would be how do YOU explain them? Ian Juby's flume experiments showed that Igneous formations can be formed in large flood conditions and since the YEC explanation is a few hundreds of years of catastrophic conditions, both LIPS and BIFS are unsurprising and no problem at all."

And while it may be obvious to some, it's worth pointing out that Radar dumping this latest bit of copypasta is because he knows he can't answer these questions:

1. Can you point us to a YEC interpretation of radiometric/ice core/tree ring data that lines up with YEC beliefs? One that matches this observable evidence and is consistent with a young Earth?

2. Can you point us to any creationist who has ever come up with a testable, falsifiable claim that confirms YEC - something that if it turns out to be true confirms, say, creation or a young Earth, and that if it turns out to be false refutes creation and/or a young Earth?

Cue more derision, evasions and misrepresentations from Radar. Such is the way of YEC.

If the answer is "God did it" and that answer is inextricably linked to "and he did it 6,000 years ago, before which there was nothing", then sorry, that's falsified. You'd be one step behind "the Flying Spaghetti Monster did it", which happens not to be falsified.

Radar: "A far better question would be how do YOU explain them? Ian Juby's flume experiments showed that Igneous formations can be formed in large flood conditions and since the YEC explanation is a few hundreds of years of catastrophic conditions, both LIPS and BIFS are unsurprising and no problem at all."

Does anyone detect an answer to that question in Radar's response?

Yes. Right here: "Ian Juby's flume experiments showed that Igneous formations can be formed in large flood conditions and since the YEC explanation is a few hundreds of years of catastrophic conditions, both LIPS and BIFS are unsurprising and no problem at all."

It is not given in the detail that y'all apparently wanted, but it is still an answer. If igneous formations can be formed in large flood conditions....and the flood also caused the deposition of fossils...then that's how creationists explain fossiliferous strata in Large Igneous Provinces. I'm not sure what more ya'll want from that.

Radar's explanation only addresses the formation of LIPS, not the formation of fossiliferous strata within them.

The key question that Jon posed is this one: "How did we get magmatic intrusions -- that is, underground lava flows that took time to occur and more time to cool and solidify -- in between layers of fossil-bearing sedimentary rock?"

A logical explanation would be that the lava cooled, sediment was deposited on top (including living organisms dying and being fossilized), lava flowed over it, cooled, sediment was deposited. Makes perfect sense, except of course it doesn't fit into a YEC time frame.

First of all, this article includes the arguments for YEC positions as well as arguments against evolution. So the "railing" comment was made by someone who didn't actually read the article. What a surprise.

Jon Woolf, for instance, hasn't bothered to read the Plume article and therefore keeps asking the same LIPS question over and over. First, we see that LIPS formations do happen in the middle of a flood as represented by the Juby experiments. Second, since there was rapid tectonic plate subduction and massive volcanic activity happening as part of the flood event, large masses of magma being injected into and through layers of soft sediments and being cooled fairly quickly by the water surrounding and also present within sediments? Easy to visualize. Furthermore, the mud rock of sediments that were left after the flood could still be penetrated easily by volcanic flows. Finally, a lot of the formations like LIPS are not classic volcanic formations but are instead inexplicable other than being a part of the flood itself. This is what testing has shown us.

"For now, let's see if any commenters have any comprehensible answers at all to the questions. I am thinking probably NOT!!!!"

If you promise to stick to the subject of this post until we've discussed all the items in it, then it will be worth doing. But if you're just going to respond with derision (as you've been doing for some time now) and then move on to yet another article pasted wholesale from somewhere else, why should anyone waste their time going through these arguments in detail.

I will remind you that natural selection and therefore speciation was a term coined by a Creationist (Blyth) and describes variation within kind, a part of the Creationist explanation for organisms. Organisms vary by the reshuffling of pre-existing genetic information in combination with some switches build into the cell for the reproductive process. Mutations are deleterious, so they occasionally produce an advantage, such as wingless beetles on a windswept island, but then that genetic information is gone from that population.

No one see mutations building anything, like an eye or a tail or a wing. We see them breaking things or more or less causing a genetic "stutter" like the double-winged fruit flies that could not fly or survive.

No, Embriette, that's not an answer. Not one that makes any sense, at least. The 'flume' experiments that Radar is talking about involved running water over clastic sediments of various sizes: sand, gravel, silt, clay. Large Igneous Provinces are huge -- and I mean HUGE, as in hundreds of thousands of square kilometers -- lava flows, usually of basaltic lava. No matter what Radar tries to tell you, no one with any knowledge of geology would try to claim that basalt can be formed from sediment deposited by flowing water.

Why bother? Evidence is that you couldn't understand the answers if you wanted to, and you won't even if you can.

Still, if you insist...

How did sex originate?

As with many aspects of biology, creationists are fond of depicting sex as an either-or thing, then demanding how did the 'sexual reproduction' used by mammals evolved from the 'asexual reproduction' used by bacteria. Of course, Rule 15 applies: it's never as simple as it seems. Some organisms reproduce by purely asexual methods, budding or fission or parthenogenesis. Some reproduce by releasing germ cells that contain all the necessary bits to grow into a new individual. Some produce undifferentiated gametes - any two of these can combine to form a new individual. Some produce differentiated gametes (sperm and egg) but one individual can produce both types. Some are male at one time in their lives, then turn female, or vice versa. And some are like us: fully sexually differentiated, fixed as one gender or the other throughout our lives. As with eyes, ears, limbs, or any of many other features, these different methods of reproduction form a spectrum, and it's easy to see how one could become the next by variation and selection. It's also not hard to see how each different method could provide a short-term selective advantage, which would lead to it becoming fixed in a population even though long-term, other methods may be better.

Why are the (expected) countless millions of transitional fossils missing?

They're not. Many transitional forms have been found. My favorite example is the series of advanced therapsids that almost perfectly demonstrate the evolutionary transformation of the reptilian rear jaw into the mammalian middle ear -- a transformation that is re-enacted in every mammalian embryo as it grows.

Continuing the subject of transitionals, I also like the example of the therizinosaurs (aka segnosaurs), because it demonstrates yet another creationist blunder. Segnosaurus and its kin are bizarre dinosaurs. They resemble theropods in some ways, yet they're clearly herbivores and highly specialized ones at that. For several decades no one knew quite what to make of them. In the absence of any primitive therizinosaurs, their ancestry was a mystery. The majority opinion, though, hypothesized that they were aberrant theropods, and predicted (whoa, where'd that word come from?) that eventually primitive therizinosaurs would be found that connected the group to conventional theropods.

Roundabout a dozen years ago some folks in China discovered a very odd dinosaur, which was named Beipiaosaurus. It was recognizably a theropod. It was a very strange theropod, though -- strange in some very specific ways. In fact, it proved to be a primitive therizinosaur, with traits that were clearly intermediate between therizinosaurs and conventional theropods.

Hmm...

Hypothesis. Prediction. Test. Result. Sounds an awful lot like the scientific method at work, that does. And it used evolutionary theory. Fancy that.

NOT! That would be like saying a Beagle is transitional between a Bloodhound and a Chihuahua.

True transitional forms have to show the transitions of systems that must develop according to Darwinism in steps, like going from a bump on the head to an eye, or some way a woodpecker tongue could be seen to grow step by step while allowing the organism to exist. Finding animals that are kind of like other animals but are fully developed won't cut it. A transitional has to demonstrate a partially-made new system so we can see how organisms could possibly survive while putting together a complex functional system or organ. Nothing like that has been found.

Let's see a few intermediate animals between a normal grass-eating creature and a giraffe. Let's see the complex system of valves and chambers of the neck of the giraffe being evolved in the fossil record. Find something like that, otherwise you are just noodling.

Here is some total BS - "No, Embriette, that's not an answer. Not one that makes any sense, at least. The 'flume' experiments that Radar is talking about involved running water over clastic sediments of various sizes: sand, gravel, silt, clay. Large Igneous Provinces are huge -- and I mean HUGE, as in hundreds of thousands of square kilometers -- lava flows, usually of basaltic lava. No matter what Radar tries to tell you, no one with any knowledge of geology would try to claim that basalt can be formed from sediment deposited by flowing water."

LIPS are not "huge" in comparison to the totality of the sedimentary rock layers. We are talking about a WORLD-WIDE FLOOD in which one continent is split into pieces by the rapid subduction of the surface tectonic plates into the magma (which has left a signature with slightly cooler temperatures after 4300 years!) and earthquakes and volcanoes and torrential rains and storms of magnitudes not seen today. Really, the concept of LIPS being formed during the catastrophic stages of this event is no problem at all for a Creationist. If you have wet sediments or newly formed-still pliable sediments and there is an massive influx of magma shooting up through them, voila, LIPS.

It is of interest that granitic rock is apparently only found on Earth, by the way. Also, scientists cannot make it in a lab. There are theories about how it came to be but what is interesting is the granitic domes and other granitic formations that thrust up from the Earth. One hypothesis is that these rocks would have to be formed with high heat and be cooled rapidly by large amounts of water in order to form. I wonder what kind of event could produce those conditions?

I predict that Jon Woolf cannot answer even one question. So far he is swinging and missing at transitionals, which is no surprise since no one has found a fossil that can be demonstrated to be an actual transitional. There are some that kind of maybe could be. But according to Darwinism, there should be a continuum of changing organisms found, which we do not find, and there could not be a Cambrian layer. The Cambrian layer has fully-formed organisms all appearing from nowhere and we have even found vertebrates in the Cambrian rocks!!! Now, if Cambrian rocks are just the bottom of the Flood sediments, it all makes sense. If not, how did all these different forms of life just *poof* into existence from nowhere?

"True transitional forms have to show the transitions of systems that must develop according to Darwinism in steps, like going from a bump on the head to an eye, or some way a woodpecker tongue could be seen to grow step by step while allowing the organism to exist. Finding animals that are kind of like other animals but are fully developed won't cut it. A transitional has to demonstrate a partially-made new system so we can see how organisms could possibly survive while putting together a complex functional system or organ. Nothing like that has been found."

And there we have it. Your argument re. transitional fossils is a nonsensical strawman: you demand to see animals that are not fully developed.

You're suggesting a kind of teleological evolution in which nature would somehow "know" that there is a better design ahead, and that if only we have a few hundred generations of non-functioning organisms, then the organism will eventually get to that point.

But that's not what evolution would predict at all. Actually, "finding animals that are kind of like other animals but are fully developed" is exactly what we would expect to see.

You've dismissed the transitional organisms based either on ignorance of evolution or a blatant misrepresentation of it.

"Let's see the complex system of valves and chambers of the neck of the giraffe being evolved in the fossil record."

It's unlikely that the fossils would be well-preserved enough to show something as delicate as blood vessels, but the evolution of the giraffe from shorter-necked creatures is thought to be from Climacoceras (early Miocene) to Samotherium and Palaeotragus (early - mid Miocene) to a variety of giraffids, most of which are now extinct.

"But according to Darwinism, there should be a continuum of changing organisms found, which we do not find, and there could not be a Cambrian layer."

There is a continuum of changing organisms found. Oh I get it - you think that all organisms first appear in the Cambrian layer. Sorry, but your reading of your propaganda sources is getting ahead of you here. Other organisms made their first appearance in earlier layers as well as later ones.

"The Cambrian layer has fully-formed organisms all appearing from nowhere"

Wrong. There are other organisms preceding the ones in the Cambrian layer. It's just that in the Cambrian, we find a lot more preserved fossils than in the rock layers above or below.

"and we have even found vertebrates in the Cambrian rocks!!!"

So?

Why the hysterical exclamation marks?

"Now, if Cambrian rocks are just the bottom of the Flood sediments, it all makes sense."

If Cambrian rocks are the bottom of the flood sediments, we would first of all expect to see fossils representing all organisms there, from hippos to stegosauruses to dogs to elephants to velociraptors etc. etc.

This is something we never see, with 100% consistency.

If Cambrian rocks are the bottom of the flood sediments, we would also expect to see a vast quantity of plant life subjected to rapid burial - basically ALL the forests and vegetation that existed on the day the flood itself started.

You should be able to trace the land surface of Earth on the day of the flood with perfect consistency. Think about it. Forests all over the world. Rapid burial. Trees can't run away. Sediment piled on top, as you keep insisting. Trees stuck in place. Now they certainly can't move.

Is this something we see in the Cambrian layer, Radar?

No?

Why do you suppose that is?

Seems like a cut-n-dry falsification of the Noah Flood myth to me.

"If not, how did all these different forms of life just *poof* into existence from nowhere?"

They didn't. *Poofing into existence* is the manner of creation described not by the theory of evolution (or by abiogenesis by natural means) but by the Bible and any number of other creation myths. Maybe that's why you like the idea so much.

They evolved, as evidenced in part by the organisms that existed before them in lower layers. The Cambrian layer was not the first evidence of life on Earth. Another possible reason is that they had also evolved harder body parts, making them more likely to leave fossils behind.

Some arguments I found that I would like to hear some dissenters view points on:

1. genealogical records of many of the European kings can be traced back to Japheth, son of Noah, and not any farther

2. The argument that human palaeontological evidence exists even in the earliest geologic 'ages'. If the layers of rock were laid down by a global flood and then interpreted as evolutionary long-ages, human remains and artefacts would appear to be in such positions.

3. Studies show that much of the world's folded beds of sediment have no compression fractures, indicating that they were contorted while they were still wet and soft. For this to occur on a global scale, and on sediment thousands of metres thick, it would have required a catastrophic global flood.

4. Globally, there is an almost complete absence of any evidence of animal and plant root activity within the tiny layers of sediment. Slowly deposited layers should show this activity, flood deposits wouldn't.

5. There is a lack of correlation between radiometric 'ages' and assumed palaeontological 'ages'. A global flood could easily create an illusion of geologic 'ages'. The consequent conflict between dating methods confirms the illusion.

6. Meteorites are basically absent from the geologic column. With the large number of meteorites hitting the earth each year, they should be very plentiful throughout the sedimentary rocks - unless much of the world's sedimentary rocks were laid down in one year.

7. Nowhere in the world is it possible to see the complete geologic column as a single structure. It is always found in bits and pieces, and mostly with pieces missing. Globally, a worldwide flood could create the illusion of a geologic column.

1. genealogical records of many of the European kings can be traced back to Japheth, son of Noah, and not any farther

Why can't they trace the genealogical records from Noah back to Adam? The lineage is right there in the Bible!

Other than that, the European Kings were Christians, so we'd expect them to claim connections to a Biblical lineage. We don't see these connections being claimed in other parts of the world. For example, genealogical records of the Emperors of Japan can be traced back to Amaterasu-ōmikami, the Sun-Goddess.

Most of you have not done your genealogical homework. Noah and his wife had no more children after Ham, Shem and Japheth and it was those three couples whose genetic materials repopulated the Earth.

It was common for most to either name one of the three sons of Noah or a grandson of Noah as the head of the lineage.

The European/African/Asian founders had already abandoned most of the teachings of the Bible and were certainly NOT Christians, as Jesus had not yet been born when they first populated the various areas to which they went. The creation story and the flood story got twisted over time and many cultures began worshipping their ancestors and seeing them as gods.

The Hebrews continued to keep the actual genealogy of mankind. The Miaso (sp) tribe of China not only goes back to Adam, they have the name of Noah's wife! Various other cultures have names identifiable from the first two or three generations after Noah.

"Globally, there is an almost complete absence of any evidence of animal and plant root activity within the tiny layers of sediment. Slowly deposited layers should show this activity, flood deposits wouldn't."

Woolf couldn't cover folded rocks with a warehouse full of quilts. In fact any of you who let him do your thinking for you are sadly mistaken. Are there no Darwinists out there willing to at least reconsider their propaganda? Sad the reflex comments with the same old boilerplate responses.

True transitional forms have to show the transitions of systems that must develop according to Darwinism in steps, like going from a bump on the head to an eye, or some way a woodpecker tongue could be seen to grow step by step while allowing the organism to exist.

This is exactly what the therapsid-to-mammal sequence shows. See also the transition from primitive archaeocete to modern mysticete, especially the changes in skull anatomy that moved the nares from the muzzle to the middle of the forehead.

Let's see the complex system of valves and chambers of the neck of the giraffe being evolved in the fossil record.

a) soft tissues generally don't fossilize.

b) the elaborate system of valves and chambers that exist in the giraffe's neck also exist in every other mammal living today, and presumably in every mammal that ever lived in the past.

If you have wet sediments or newly formed-still pliable sediments and there is an massive influx of magma shooting up through them, voila, LIPS.

Wrong-o. Do some research, Radar. Learn what Large Igneous Provinces really are and the form they really take. Those LIPs known as 'traps' and 'flood basalts,' such as the Deccan Traps and the Siberian Traps, are clearly made up of numerous extrusive lava flows deposited one atop another to depths of hundreds of meters, interspersed with fossiliferous sedimentary strata.

"Okay, Highboy, to start with, could you tell us if you understand the arguments in question and agree with them?"

I understand them. Not sure if I agree with them. This is the first I've heard of these particular ones which is why I posted them. Do you have an answer?

"Why can't they trace the genealogical records from Noah back to Adam? The lineage is right there in the Bible!"

No one said they couldn't, and that didn't really answer the point at all.

"Which it doesn't. So what exactly is the argument?"

The argument is that it DID exist.

"He copied them from here:http://www.unmaskingevolution.com/18-flood.htm"

Correct. Does anyone want to address them for me?

"Finally coming out as a creationist highboy?"

Because I found a list of YEC arguments on the internet I wanted you guys to respond to? Really? So basically out of all that the amount of substance I got back was "na-uh" to a few of the points. Someone said derision isn't an argument, and I agree, but I fail to see how "no its not" is any more of a compelling argument. Maybe now that we all know what site the points came from maybe someone can offer a coherent answer?

highboy, most of the 'arguments' you quote are not arguments, but allegations. To become arguments they'd have to have some kind of evidence. For example:

2. The argument that human palaeontological evidence exists even in the earliest geologic 'ages'.

There are known, verified cases of human remains and/or tools in Paleozoic and Mesozoic times? Where? What kind of evidence? What proof is there that they're in situ discoveries, and not either intrusive burials or hoaxes?

4. Globally, there is an almost complete absence of any evidence of animal and plant root activity within the tiny layers of sediment.

"Almost complete"? How much in an "almost"? There are many locales where paleontologists have found paleosols with preserved burrows and plant roots. There are even cases of finding coprolites (fossil animal droppings) that have been burrowed by the ancient versions of dung-beetles and other decomposers. You tell me how that could happen in the middle of a flood deposit.

6. Meteorites are basically absent from the geologic column. With the large number of meteorites hitting the earth each year, they should be very plentiful throughout the sedimentary rocks...

Large number? The number of meteors per year is very large -- tens of thousands. The number of meteorites per year is perhaps a few hundred. A few hundred, scattered over the entire surface of the Earth.

This one has a convenient counter-question: how does the Flood scenario explain the fact that the known impact craters appear to be of widely different ages? The Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona is still raw. The Ries crater in Germany is heavily eroded but still easily recognizable on the surface. The Manicouagan crater in Canada is almost entirely gone from surface view save for the ring-shaped lake that surrounds the impact point.

"highboy, most of the 'arguments' you quote are not arguments, but allegations. To become arguments they'd have to have some kind of evidence."

Fine, so address them and let's talk about them, which is all I was asking for, and in return just got childish nonsense for no apparent reason. Its kind of telling that when I first posted the list of points the very first response was from someone demanding to know where I got the points from. Strong evidence that most on this site are more concerned with attacking a source than actually arguing the points on there merits. In any event, I was simply looking into some YEC arguments and these are the one's that jumped out at me.

None of the sources I have go into any detail whatsoever. Maybe radar can elaborate? The problem I'm running into is that most information blogger blowhards throw around in these debates from both sides usually end up stemming from lists of books. I find it amusing that most I encounter who are so passionate in these debates from either side have never once had any direct access to any scientific data, never did any scientific experiments, and are simply going by what they read, which has been my point all along. But thanks for at least attempting to answer some of these points though I can't seem to find any details about any of them anywhere. Perhaps radar can.

Asking if you've come out as a creationist now counts as derision? That was not my intent, but since you're still undecided, I guess we can await the time when you present some of the litany of evidence supporting long ages to Radar so he can respond to it.

In my mind, that's only fair.

"Maybe now that we all know what site the points came from maybe someone can offer a coherent answer"

You know, you could have made that a whole lot easier by just including the link to the site.

"You know, you could have made that a whole lot easier by just including the link to the site."

And you could have simply just answered the points, which you didn't need a link to the site to do. And since you still haven't, I'm guessing you simply don't have an answer. I didn't say that asking me if I was ascribing to YEC is derision, so maybe you could brush up on your reading comprehension as well? What I said was that simply saying "no" to the points posted wasn't an argument either, and that's basically all I got until Jon showed up. What would be "easier" as you put it next time is if someone simply responded to what was posted instead of trying to glean from or ween in stuff that isn't there.

"since you're still undecided, I guess we can await the time when you present some of the litany of evidence supporting long ages to Radar so he can respond to it.

In my mind, that's only fair."

That's great for you but I'm not interested in what you think is fair. I've seen radar get grilled over "evidence" of long ages, what I haven't seen are answers to the points I came across. If they've been answered on this site my bad, I don't go back and check every single post radar ever made before asking someone to discuss something with me. If you don't wish to discuss what I brought up, good for you, but if you're sitting in front of your computer pouting with your arms crossed because I haven't asked radar to answer a list of long age points not only are you the most childish internet troll ever but you're also so clearly lacking in objectivity it would be a waste of time anyways. But if you want to conclude I'm secretly a YEC guy by all means, cradle that thought to your breast. Why? A couple of reasons:

1. I could care less what an anonymous poster thinks about my views.2. I have no fear being labeled either a YEC or an OEC creationist. No one I've ever encountered in the blogosphere to my knowledge is a scientist working in the field able to present first hand testable results so you and every other blogger that has ever taken a stand to me one way or the other are just ascribing to whatever they have read and nothing more.

And now that we have that out of the way (maybe) I say again to Jon, nothing I'm reading concerning those points I found goes into much detail, so maybe radar can elaborate further. I simply was googling around about YEC and came across a variety of lists and those are the ones that jumped out at me. To answer the questions you raised back at me I'd have to know more about the original points posted.

Because we know the magnetic field's maximum strength and have measured it's degradation, we can be pretty certain the Earth is les than 100,000 years old. Because the RATE conference discovered that there are helium atoms still present in granitic zircons, that means the Earth is even younger than that. Since we found polonium radiohalos in rocks, we could see that there were rapid changes of massive proportions recently in Earth history. Because we find carbon-14 in pre-Cambrian rocks (Darwinists always cry 'contamination' no matter what the conditions) we can be sure that the Earth is far less than 100,00 years old. Since the long-age measuring sticks Darwinists like to use give long ages for brand new volcanic rocks, we can toss all of their long age half-life measuring sticks into the trash. Since we have sent several satellites to or swinging past all the planets, we have discovered evidence that the planets and the moons are all quite young. In fact one moon far out in space is continually spraying out volcanic spews in amounts never seen here on Earth. The amount of heat generated by the gas giants is more than they are receiving from the sun, so they are not very old. The magnetic fields on some planets are baffling unless these planets were created recently. Also, the RATE conference detected cooler areas in the magma where rapidly subducted tectonic plates must have gone during the Flood and found the temperatures have not yet warmed up to match the rest of the magma, thus making a Flood a few thousand years ago a matter of observable evidence. Also, the MT ST Helens event showed us that a major flood would not leave trees in place but would rip them from their rooted spots, strip them of leaves, most if not all branches and sometimes bark and roots and then later leave them floating and eventually most settle with one end down and get covered with sediments. That is why we have large numbers of polystrate trees, most of which have roots down (that would tend to be the heavier end) but never appearing to have remained in place. The Flood was not a slow rise in water level, it was a catastrophic event that dwarfs the MSH event and violently uprooted the dry land it encountered. But far under water, most of the bottom dwellers and fish near the bottom were suddenly buried in millions of tons of sediments and captured in place. That is what the fossil record reflects - sea bottom creatures in large numbers trapped, other creatures far more rarely found and large creatures able to see danger running to high ground and escaping for a short time until every area of Earth was overcome. Much of the fossilization and pretty much any amber came from massive floating mats of vegetation where some animals lasted for awhile and many insects, plants and microorganisms managed to ride the flood out.

"Honestly, highboy, if you're just going to cut-and paste your questions, why is the onus on me to answer all of them?"

Who said it was "on you" to answer them? Are you seriously that childish? Is this concept really that hard for you to grasp? I saw a list of points about YEC I found interesting and wanted some thoughts from whoever was willing on this site since its a hot topic of debate. That's it. Yet you still continue with this ridiculously adolescent line of b.s.

"It probably took you all of five minutes to find them and post them, but it would take someone hours of research to answer a couple of them (mostly to have an airtight case)."

That's odd because you guys have been debating radar about YEC and firing off rebuttals pretty quickly.

"So, I'll respond in an equally lazy way -- just by searching for one of your questions, you get answers to them. Ain't google grand?"

That's awesome except if I was simply looking for anyone's answers to these points that would be relevant. Let me post again my original request: "Some arguments I found that I would like to hear some dissenters view points on"

So now that we've twice established now your reading comprehension resembles that of a third grader I guess when can now cross "anonymous" off the list of people we can take serious to speak intelligently on the subject of science. So I guess its probably just as well you stuck with childish nonsense instead of trying to engage in a simple discussion.

You can lead a Woolf to water but you cannot make him drink. LIPS are exactly what I described and their existence makes sense in a catastrophic environment. You either do not or cannot comprehend this. So I give up. I suspect most readers understand that the formations were reproduced by Juby's experiments and they fit better into a Creationist Flood scenario than any uniformitarian or mini-catastrophic hypothesis your side tries to use to explain them.

"Let's see the complex system of valves and chambers of the neck of the giraffe being evolved in the fossil record.

a) soft tissues generally don't fossilize.

b) the elaborate system of valves and chambers that exist in the giraffe's neck also exist in every other mammal living today, and presumably in every mammal that ever lived in the past."

Ignorance! We have seen fossilized Jellyfish, for crying out loud! Furthermore the Giraffe neck's system is unlike any other. Jon, you apparently don't know much about the structure of the Giraffe but it is hilarious to say that all mammals have such systems. That is akin to saying that all insetss have dragonfly wings, or that all birds have specially insulated brains like woodpeckers! Wrong squared!

The Giraffe neck is unique in all of the animal kingdom, no other creature has the same structure. The Bombadier Beetle has a unique explosive weapon no other creature has. The e. coli that have the very cool flagellum that are motorized and get replaced and repaired on the fly. The idea is that transitional forms have to be bridges from no neck valves at all to multiple valves, from non-insulated skulls to insulated, from no flagellum at all to the magificent and fantastic flagellum in place.

"Maybe now that we all know what site the points came from maybe someone can offer a coherent answer?"

What do I think of the arguments? I think some of them are blatantly false: i.e. the one about human remains in fossil layers. As Jon pointed out, some of them are just accusations with no evidence and as such are worthless and some are just trying to poke holes in long ages but don't lend any credence to creationism.

But ultimately, what does it matter? I'm not an expert in any of the above-mentioned fields. If you want expertise, listen to Jon. I know enough to know that he knows his stuff.

I'm going to cite my third-grade reading comprehension as a reason that I don't respond to the rest of your petulant comment. I hope if we continue talking it can be civil.

Jon is no more of an expert than am I. Unless Jon has a doctorate in some field of biology or geology or physical science or astronomy, etc? He is just an educated man with an opinion. I am an educated man with an opinion. Our opinions are remarkably at odds, so one of us is very wrong. It isn't a game and no one keeps score. My job is to present evidence to convince people that Darwinism is a P.T.Barnum construct of bad science, rumors, fairy tales and just-so stories that cannot be supported by the evidence we can see and inspect today.

Darwin had an excuse, he had no idea how complex organisms were and their obvious design features and massive amounts of information and very amazing repairs on the fly happening non-stop would have astonished him and no doubt toss aside his hypothesis.

Darwinism is kind of like those glowsticks you crack or smack and they begin giving off light. The chemical reactions that set off the glow will finish, the mix will reach stasis and it will not glow anymore. When Darwin's hypothesis first hit the big screen, all sorts of atheists wanted one of those Atheist Glowsticks!!! Hurray, an excuse for Atheism! But that glow ended years ago. Sad to see someone like Dawkins hold up a stick that doesn't glow at all and claim he has light. Nope. It is gone and it will not come back. Real science has left it behind. Sad pathetic armies of Darwinists walk around holding up dead glowsticks as if they can shed light on anything. Welcome to the 21st Century!

I no longer care. It took you nearly 6 comments before you were actually willing to even address (half-assedly if that's a word) anything I actually posted.

"I'm not an expert in any of the above-mentioned fields"

which is why its curious you belittle and berate radar time and time again on these topics where you admittedly have no expertise. You have no way of verifying anything for yourself or for us in these scientific discussions so you, like the rest of us, are merely picking and choosing what you want to believe out of everything you've read. Nothing more. As for Jon being an expert, I have no way of knowing that and neither do you. But he at least took what I actually posted for what it was, and attempted a normal dialogue.

"Fine, so address them and let's talk about them, which is all I was asking for, and in return just got childish nonsense for no apparent reason. Its kind of telling that when I first posted the list of points the very first response was from someone demanding to know where I got the points from."

Highboy, are you sure you really want a normal dialogue?You post a list of statements on which you would like an opinion. Fine. But would you like an informed, substantiated opinion or rather an uninformed, emotional one?If you want a substantiated opinion, you can only get that based on a substantiated point. Hence the question (NOT the demand) as to where you found the arguments. This was only asked as to be able to verify on what these points are based because, as Jon already correctly pointed out, these are merely allegations; points without any evidence. The points talk about 'studies' and 'evidence', but don't specify which studies or evidence. The original source of your points might refer to the studies or evidence. Hence the question.

You say 'no it's not' is not an argument and you are absolutely right. But you cannot expect more when your question boils down to 'yes it is'. It's simply a statement without any evidence.

You asked for an opinion, and someone asks for more information in order to give you a substantiated opinion. Why is that 'childish'?

"You asked for an opinion, and someone asks for more information in order to give you a substantiated opinion. Why is that 'childish'?"

Because that wasn't why you asked. If it was, you would have proceeded with a normal dialogue once you figured out where the list was from. Instead you kept going down some weird irrelevant path to where you were even whining about it being more "fair" only if I ask radar to do the same thing with a different list. Yes, that's childish nonsense. It was just a list of points I found that I thought I'd thrown in here to see what some people thought. Why it ended up being a masterpiece of confusion is a question only you can answer. Or maybe you can't.

"Because that wasn't why you asked. If it was, you would have proceeded with a normal dialogue once you figured out where the list was from. Instead you kept going down some weird irrelevant path to where you were even whining about it being more "fair" only if I ask radar to do the same thing with a different list."

No, that wasn't me. I only asked for the source, nothing more. Please be careful when jumping to conclusions or slinging out accusations, or trying to mind-read.I understand that it can be confusing with all these 'Anonymouses' but that's all the more reason to be careful.

Now; what's childish about asking for the source of your points in order to give a substantiated opinion? What's so 'telling' about it?

"No, that wasn't me. I only asked for the source, nothing more. Please be careful when jumping to conclusions or slinging out accusations, or trying to mind-read."

Hey pal, its not mind reading, its responding to the comment directed to me by "anonymous". If you don't want to be confused with someone else, don't use the same screen name.

"Now; what's childish about asking for the source of your points in order to give a substantiated opinion? What's so 'telling' about it?"

Because you didn't need the source to give a substantiated opinion. Jon certainly didn't. No one else on any of the forums using the same source did. And now that you know the source you still haven't given a substantiated opinion.

Now you're just embarrassing yourself, Radar. Please, take some time and do some research in real geology sources, not creationist moonbattery. Large Igneous Provinces are exactly as I described them. Flood basalts are exactly as I described them. What you claim has no resemblance to any rational form of geology that I've ever heard of.

Because we know the magnetic field's maximum strength and have measured it's degradation, we can be pretty certain the Earth is les than 100,000 years old.

Until we look a little farther and notice that Earth's magnetic field has reversed periodically throughout its history.

Me: "a) soft tissues generally don't fossilize."

Radar: "We have seen fossilized Jellyfish, for crying out loud!"

So we have. But that level of preservation is extremely rare, and almost unheard of in terrestrial deposits. As far as I know, no one has found such soft-tissue preservation in mammals.

Me: "b) the elaborate system of valves and chambers that exist in the giraffe's neck also exist in every other mammal living today, and presumably in every mammal that ever lived in the past."

Radar: "Furthermore the Giraffe neck's system is unlike any other."

Only in detail, not in kind. The special features of the giraffe's neck are simply enhanced versions of features that all mammals have.

I read your comments actually because they get sent straight to my email if I subscribe to comments on a post that interests me. Not sure why they aren't showing up here.

"That doesn't follow. I can have enough knowledge of automobiles so I can tell if one mechanic is more knowledgeable than another without being a mechanic myself. Similarly, while not being an expert, I can clearly see that Jon has substantial expertise in geology and is very knowledgeable on biology as well."

Understanding geology and biology doesn't mean I can spot an expert based on points they make over the internet. I've been doing Muay Thai long enough that if I talk about it most would consider me an "expert" but I'm not even close.

"In addition, he has a vast website with his own research on it. His work has also been published"

I have had dozens of websites and even have an accredited college education on theology but I'm no expert, and certainly getting published doesn't make anyone an expert on anything.

Highboy,I think you're missing a subtle distinction. While you don't claim to be an *expert* in theology or muay thai, by now, you have sufficient expertise to recognize one. I'm certain that if given two people who claim expertise in either discipline, you'd be able to decide who actually had it.

Similarly, both Radar and Jon make that claim, and I have sufficient expertise to see that Jon is the real deal, while radar's claims of expertise don't add up. Read Jon's site, he's put an impressive amount of his own, original research on it, the guy knows his stuff.

Radar, on the other hand has repeatedly said that he expects bacteria to turn in to something 'other than bacteria' in just 20 years. No one who claims to understand evolution can possibly believe that to be true.

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